News You Can Bruise for 2010 March

(1) Tue Mar 02 2010 18:27 Star Trek vs. Batman: No need to dream, it's a filmed mashup of the 1960s Star Trek and the 1960s Batman. The Batman writing is pretty decent, but the Star Trek writing is bland and doesn't capture the feel of the series.

Thu Mar 04 2010 16:47: Last week Sumana and I went to the launch party for N.K. Jemisin's epic "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms". Nora founded the writing group I'm in, and I read and critiqued a draft of the novel just before she sold it. Then she left the writing group and went off to be a famous novelist.

I always have a difficult time at events held in bars, but Sumana is very good at introducing me to people. For instance, I met Saladin Ahmed, who along with Nora was nominated for a Nebula this year. And then comes this SF Signal interview with Saladin, Nora, and many other Nebula nominees. "If your work couldn't have been on the ballot this year, what work would you have liked in its place?" Saladin:

I'd also have been happy to see more two-fisted fun on the ballot. Two of the absolute best stories I read this year were "Zeppelin City" by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, and "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" by Leonard Richardson. Both were ridiculously enjoyable and Nebula-worthy to my mind.

I'm encouraged!

Thu Mar 04 2010 17:21 Incomprehensible Joke:

S: "I always wondered what would happen if you put a disc in the Wii the wrong way."
L: "It shows a Koopa Troopa on its back."

Fri Mar 05 2010 20:58 Work humor:

"I will lock you and [x] in a room for a week to sort this out."
"We would spend that week planning vengeance on you for locking us in a room!"
"The scenario you put forward seems all too plausible."

(1) Mon Mar 08 2010 14:44: Tired of finding kitten? In Robot Wants Kitty, kitten is dangled just out of your reach for the whole game. And since there's a power-up early on that makes precision movement pretty much impossible, I never found kitten. On the plus side, hey, it's another robotfindskittenlike game.

(2) Wed Mar 10 2010 21:29 It's All Fun And Games: Check out REDDER, the psychotropic game with the palindromic name. I'm a big fan of the strange effect that happens as you play, but I won't mention too much to avoid whatever passes for spoilers when it comes to strange gameplay effects.

Fri Mar 12 2010 07:39 "Frankly, I do not feel this hatred.": The Israeli fanzine Bli Panika (Don't Panic) has published an awesome Hebrew translation of Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Ehud Maimon. Google Translate translates the title back into English as "Mention dinosaurs and glory", and Tark and Entippa's names are transliterated Tariq and Antipathy. Pretty fun!

Back when I first heard about this project, I mentioned to editor Rami Shal'heveth that the story's title is a riff on a phrase originally in Hebrew, but he probably already knew that. Actually, no: "Ben-Sira's book is one of those canonical texts that everybody knows of, but nobody reads."

(2) Fri Mar 12 2010 08:47 The Long Joke: In 2001 my sister Susanna sent me the birthday card you see before you. It said "Whee! You're 3 22!" I thought this was hilarious, and I kept the card.

Then Susanna had a daughter, and I had an idea. Recently Maggie turned three, and I gave my niece the birthday card Susanna had sent me eight years earlier. "Whee! You're 3 22 3!" The payoff was worth it. "I laughed for like 5 minutes," said Susanna.

Recently I was doing a video chat with Susanna and I mentioned:

L: So I'm jogging for an hour every day, and I realized I wasn't doing enough reading, so I decided I also needed to read for half an hour every day. And I also want to devote half an hour to games, though that's not as much of a problem. And I think I should also allocate at least half an hour for writing. But if I keep dividing up my free time like this then my whole life will be...

S: Organized?

Hmm.

Sat Mar 13 2010 13:29: Evan: "You really need to watch Summer School on the original rental VHS. It's like listening to the Beatles on LP."

Sun Mar 14 2010 22:34: Speaking of Evan, he's started a new weblog, walltype, where he curates photos from Flickr that fit his own baroque categorizations. I think it has explodingdog-esque potential.

Speaking of new weblogs by my friends: Pat Rafferty's Raffertyesque. Now you have something to read while you look at Evan's curated pictures.